The Tattoo was just the start…

CHAPTER TEN

The Supernatural Confessions of Edith Anthrax

The first I knew about it was a frantic message on the ansafone “The Spikes have split up. Ring me. Please”. But I’m afraid I ignored it. In semi-hibernation we lay low almost dreaming, in ice-cold caverns of bed clothes, where hands and feet froze into torture appliances of surgical steel. Bella and Jesus are spending the day in bed, again. It was sunday. The phone rings again. The message on the ansafone is from the Marquessa. Jesus speaks to her in mild, calming tones. She is obviously hysterical, or furious, or both. “Yes yes, I’ll be over as soon as I can. Yes yes yesyes yes” He sympathised. He was scrambling around finding his clothes, loin-cloth, blue robe, sandals, staff. He spoke to me “It’s the Marquessa. She’s had an argument with Dolly. She wants me to go over and sort it all out now” I pout “yes yes yes” he soothed into the phone. “I’ve got to go now” I pout again “Damn you! It’s WORK. Remember that word?” he sneered “yes yes ” he burbled into the phone “I’m on my way now, and don’t you fret so much”. He put the phone down, “I’ll ring you later” he muttered, exiting.

I switched on the TV, Sonja was reciting a message into a microphone, a press conference.
Sonja’s statement to the press

Love Under Will, Sex Under Drugs.

“Dress yourselves in fine apparel, eat rich foods and drink sweet wines, take your fill and will of love as you will. Hanging out in Hyde Park, my memory became impaired. The good old daze, stoned in the sunny afternoon, dressed insanely on toppling clogs loud tranny radio swinging a half empty bourbon bottle drugs kill boredom tattooed across my tits. Love, death, resurrection, re-arrest. Your drugs Sir! Drop in Drug up Drag out. Blinding! Lurking clandestinely in some secret assignation, there is love and lover, there is the dove and the seer, choose ye well. Your drugs madam! “Louis Lewin single stop frame image William Burroughs rising in the pan Aldous Huxley water pouring from a perforated bucket Allen Ginsberg dogshit Kathy Acker torture insane Tim Leary corpulent genitals Lydia Lunch distortion Carlos Castenada desire Patti Smith love disorientation”. My ecstasy is in yours, my joy is your joy, my ecstasy is yours, your ecstasy is mine. I woke into one drug after another with sharp pains, strange modifications in the reproductive instinct, Drip on Drug up Drag, not stoned snatches at reality. Your drugs darling!. Ur. I am glowing spikes of light, water pouring from a perforated bucket. In public? Do you want to fuck me? Do you want to fuck me? Do you want to fuck me? I’d love to! Then I woke up, shaking with numb cold, alcohol sick and shame. Duty consists in determining to experience the right event from one moment of consciousness to another. Your drugs Sir! Felt tipped across my tits. But still the phone doesn’t ring.

Drop in Drug up Drag out. The ass called love a lopped off cock encrusted with bloodstones. My memory became impaired, shaking with numb cold, alcohol sick and shame, in and out of view pink lumpy vomit cascading onto somebody’s magnetic acoustic field and death ray type floral sofa. Acoustic oscillations in the head, visual impairment disorientation hot commandments chaos, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, love is the law, love under will. Water pouring from a perforated bucket.
Functional, competent, functional. Ye are not the chosen. And still the phone doesn’t ring.
Full on the lips, snogged stupid in the sex-sweat streets heaving, I am glowing spikes of light energy, devilish finger tips persuading a nipple. Then I woke up, early morning arousal with Jah Ben Magic, waking into a polymorphic sensual feast curious curious curiouser swirling water, a lambent flame of blue, all touching, all penetrant, my hands on the lovely hard earth, take you fill of love. the law of Thelema. e. reality contracts into the contact of lips, and slips out on a distant wing and I am the centre, a beatific smile that insanely loud tranny bourbon bottle drug boredom on my tits and freezes frantic reality with her blue light stare. I am glowing spike of light, water pouring from a perforated bucket I am weightless beatific smile, a gorgeous ceiling you’ve got! full on the lips, merging into genitals a sensation of transformation, desire love disorientation torture, blood under my fingernails, mute flakes of memory, instruction from a master theorion and his appointed assistants. The ass called love a well-charred heart, bathing my whole body in a sweet smelling perfume of sweat. Raw power. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, there is no law beyond do what thou wilt.”

The assembled hacks didn’t return Sonja’s beatific smile, how could they use any of this?

The phone rang. It was Frankie, now he needs to talk.
It was already a year later so we stood opposite each other like strangers. “You know what we were talking about the other day” Frankie said in a wheedling voice “Like last-year the-other-day” I bitched “Well” he continued undaunted “I’ve decided that I would be better off dead”. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, my tongue lolled like a stone in my mouth. He was a young doomed hero, sitting on a white satin-covered stool sucking thick syrups through alabaster straws, or sprawled across the bonnet of a big flashy white car, as if he owned the damned thing.
“So you don’t want to come to the station with me?” Now he was pouting, pulling the best James Dean poses I’d ever seen.
“No” The stone slipped down to my heart.
“Then I’ll go”. He left with the harsh winter sun shining through his hair like a halo, his dark sunken eyes glowed in his cadaver white face.

Slashing at the past with a machete. I am plunging into green and poisoned water to wash the blood spots from my mind. Tainted with this blood, lost slashing and screaming and drowning, still gathering no moss.
The angel of time hovers over the priestess, mixing her flowing waters and liquids, fluids from chalice to grail and back and forth, mixing blending transforming healing. Wash away the fears of the past, the dictates of convention, tradition swept away.
The priestess and her angel of time casting visions and knowledge. Understanding and transformation. Shine on in the forehead of the fool, who ends one journey and starts the new with the same flowing circle of eternal traveling.

The Supernatural Confessions of Edith Anthrax

A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy sunday in London, I’ve often regretted that it didn’t kill me. So I accepted the first injection, I didn’t know what was coming to me, an initiation into nothingness. The image of the eternal quest for the gold buried beneath the filth and horror threatened to besiege the citadel of life itself. The celestial drug infected by inhaling, ingesting or injecting spores.
Destiny, my evil destiny, lay in wait for me once more.
The man who opened to me my own paradise, dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain. The druggist, unconscious minister of the celestial pleasures, the beatific vision of the immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. These mummified remains bear witness to this. Fellow travellers, fornicators, butchers and dealers in hides, animal hair, and wool and handlers of bonemeal all felt the same demonstrable changes in spleen, lungs, liver and brain. I’ve often regretted that it didn’t kill me.
Entombed, living in a silver box, alone with the mysteries of the human head. Haemorrahagic inflammation of the blood vessel communicated chemical serenity and equipoise to all my faculties, areas of necrosis and intestinal oedema. I felt that the diviner part of my nature was paramount, my moral affections in a state of cloudless void serenity. The infiltration of the tissue without abscess formation. Now I knew that happiness can be bought and carried in the waistcoat pocket, portable heavens may be corked up in a bottle. The pain was so intense that I screamed, I’ve often regretted that I enjoyed it so much. I demanded another injection. Which they bring to me on a silver platter. What an upheaving from its lowest depths of my inner spirit. Here was the panacea for all human woes. The secret of happiness itself. The formation of a carbuncle, nothing less than hope, the influence of heaven, eloquence and life. I felt so happy that I demanded another injection.
They made me wait as long as possible. I was no more than a remnant of humanity, these mummified remains bear witness to this. I was captured alive, chained and led from house to house, mocked and ill-treated. I was taken out covered in cuts, I had a fractured arm, I had broken ribs. Each time I pronounced the hated “I” word, I had to gash my arms with razors, pierce my skin with needles, so that I would not forget that there can be no supreme progress while I had the slightest trace of “I” self remaining. I screamed for another injection. I had nightmares. I would wake up screaming. I saw strange disturbing people wander into my bedroom. THEY would leave as soon as they’d been paid. Wretched men would thrust their daggers through holy sacrament in front of an idol of Satan. I felt all the time that there were hands at my throat. The pain was so intense that I screamed. I felt amazingly happy. I begged for another injection. I was lost. A stain smear of fluid between me and hell.

Scrabbling with a swirl of spikey thoughts and terrors. I plunge my head under the pounding hot shower, and lean back against the sticky cold tiled wall. I imagine that the hypodermic waits on the shelf, and ground myself with the anticipation of imaginary relief. And think through all the hours of wandering, working and waiting that go to make up a single shot. Culminating in the comfort of repetition, a routine for life. A life-sentence. Dead cold frozen in eternal numbness. Terrifying images blend and coagulate, but I pass on by, devoid of fear, dreaming.

Another Day, I lie in bed, not sleeping in the late afternoon, sticking to the bed sheets, curtains drawn, hot sickness in my mind. Crows screech outside my window, calling another wasted day into being. I lean over the side of the bed, grasping for cigarettes. The tiny shards of light sparkle across the silver star studded lid of the dope-tin.

I sit for hours listening to and quantifying the monologue chain words in my head.

I sit day after day in darkened rooms, on mattresses or divans, waiting for silence to hit me.

Star showers flutter from the ceiling.

I plunge down into the murky water of the stagnant lake, down disturbing settled rotting matter, down through broken reeds and sinking leaves, water. Unsteady foothold on the slimy mud bottom, kicking around, clearing a space. A trapdoor appears in the lake bed. Climb down an iron runged ladder into stark subterranean corridors, harsh lighting picks out no deviance from uniform blue walls and white doors, it could be a prison, a prison of the mind. I am afraid there are no people here, only thoughts, ideas, emotions and hysterias, claustrophobia and loneliness.
I return by the way I came, up the metal ladder, fear too, push at the resisting trap door. I am weakened by fear, stretched by panic. The trap door crashes open, clanging cell door, water pours over me.
I open my eyes, face down in an oily asphalt puddle, it is dark.

The shadows drop away, and silence finally falls, a deep expanding silence, that even the rustling of leaves cannot penetrate.
The long dull drugless wasting days, straight and waiting. Devoid of dreaming.

Not Walking Notes
Eyes like saucers, brain gone dead, gums are bleeding and I’m losing my thread, gimme the money, gimme the bread, buy me the stuff to straighten my head. Don’t you know I could die, don’t you know it’s been known. It’s been over a year and I’m clucking like fuck. Don’t want money, don’t want love, I just want stuff.
This sickness, humankind dying face down, drunk from the poisoned lake, starved, burnt and blind, screaming, hysterical, naked, pushing the scorched earth of forest fire into to its ravaged mouth for food, staving off the encroaching desert with sips of its own unfiltered urine. Ripped, crushed and torn in slicing cosmic winds, dolphins die belly up floating in The Thames, rainfalls of desiccated tadpoles, a plague of boils, abscesses pushing teeth out of bleeding gums. Coagulant she said in disgust. He looked at her, sucked at a weeping wound, clearing a gap in the vein, and spat the greenish pus over his shoulder, into the crackling coals of the open fire.
I tumble, I am falling, I slip through the gaps in the urban network, face down.
I am falling, plunging down down down towards a midnight blue distance, face down spread-eagled in space. My heart is in my mouth, but I’m loving every second of it.
Whatever horrors may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, what ever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage, “How splendid is the adventure”

My life became a constant round of chemical pursuit of that first free fall. There were days when I couldn’t sleep, nor open my eyes. My thoughts seem to cut out before imagination kicked in. Words came out in slow gasps. White letters against black. My spirit was running dry, running cold and turning my muse to icy fear.

The chains that bind us, you, bind me too. Lives that sink without a trace. A forgotten carrier bag in the dusty corner of a left luggage office. I’m suddenly aware of my own mortality, as a slow vibrating creeping feeling, a sensation growing up from the pit of my ice-cold stomach. My head is so cold. I cannot write another word. That I’m exhausted with words. Sick and broken words never catching the glorious multi-forms that hover and trip and dance constantly in front of my eyes. Words failing vision, the sky is caving in. How splendid is the adventure.

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Thee Twisted Times Ov Bella Basura

Underground novel. First Published in serialised paper format. Stapled A5 double-sided. 1996. First Published in book form 1998. Currently available online and being prepared to be published in e-book format.

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